A new paper by H.E. Jones and colleagues compares cultivars of different ages under organic and non-organic systems, and concludes that modern varieties simply aren’t suited to organic systems.

2) The environmentalism of the poor. The poor want biomass not biodiversity is the unsurprising result on a new literature review from the Nature Conservancy reports SciDev.net.

“People just don’t care about biodiversity,” said Craig Leisher of the US-based Nature Conservancy, at the meeting, ‘Linking biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction: what, why and how?’ held at the UK’s Zoological Society of London.Leisher, who conducted the research with Neil Larsen, also from the Nature Conservancy, gave the example of a poor fisherman, for whom the route out of poverty is to catch more fish — not more kinds of fish. …

But Matt Walpole, head of the UN Environment Programme’s Ecosystem Assessment Programme, and an author of the Science study, warned that the finding that biomass was more important than biodiversity was context-specific.

“If one thinks in terms of consumptive use then amount is important,” he said. But in agriculture, for example, biodiversity is important.

“Variability allows adaptability to variations in the ecosystem … if you’ve got variation then you are more resistant to shocks.”

Jake Rice and … economist Serge Garcia, are concerned that measures to conserve marine biodiversity are in contradiction with policies to protect food security, with the likely upshot that both will fail to address their respective goals.

The conundrum is straightforward: by mid-century, there’ll be an additional 2 billion people on earth, each of whom will need to eat. In total, they’ll require an extra 3.65*108 of dietary protein. Forecasts suggest that we’ll need an 11% increase in irrigation for grain production just to keep pace with human population growth, not withstanding the impacts of climate change on crops and water availability. Right now, one-third of the world’s population relies on fish and fisheries products for at least one-fifth of their annual protein intake; if that continues to be the case, we’ll need around 70 million metric tonnes more fish protein by 2050, says Rice.

That’s something like 75-100% of current fish protein production. So how can we generate this and manage our fisheries? Rice outlines several possible options, each of which involves a conflict with environmental management. …

The problem, says Rice, is that these clearly conflicting policy goals aren’t being looked at by the same people at a high enough level. Now that the old problem of fisheries governance is being met with the newer problems of climate change and rapid population growth, we need a merger of these discussions, he says. He’d like to see the Convention on Biological Diversity pay more attention to the sustainable food dimension of their mandate and the Food and Agricultural Organization speaking with the CBD at a higher level. Eventually, says Rice, the UN General Assembly should be the forum to look at merging and prioritizing these policies.

Agriculture increases the supply of food supplied by an ecosystem, but often decreases its ability to supply other services. The same appears to be true for salmon aquaculture. In the Toronto Globe and Mail, Vancouver journalist Mark Hume reports Declining salmon runs blamed for wilderness tourism slump:

All along the B.C. Coast, wilderness tourism operators who run bear-viewing, whale-watching and sport-fishing resorts are reporting tough times because of declining salmon runs.

But the biggest impact may be occurring in the Broughton Archipelago, where Mr. MacKay operates, and where pink salmon runs have all but vanished, sending a shock wave through the region’s ecosystem.

“Some of the northern pods are just not here,” Mr. MacKay said yesterday. “And we’ve had three occasions [this summer] when we did not see any orcas at all. That’s pretty weird.”

He said northern killer whales visit the area during the summer months, collecting in big social gatherings where breeding takes place.

“When they get together like that it’s called Super Pod Day, and we will see over 100 dorsal fins out there at a time,” Mr. MacKay said. “That didn’t happen this year, for the first time since we’ve been collecting data, which is almost 30 years.”

Mr. MacKay said it’s not coincidental that the whales have vanished along with the salmon.

“It’s pretty simple. …What do you think these orcas eat?” he said.

Surveys by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans indicate pink salmon stocks have fallen to extremely low levels in the Broughton Archipelago. In Glendale Creek, a key indicator stream, there have been only 19,000 spawners counted this year, compared with 264,000 last year.

Pink salmon, which usually spawn in prodigious numbers, are a keystone species on the West Coast. Chinook salmon, the mainstay of the orca diet, feed on young pinks, while grizzly and black bears depend on spawning adult pink salmon to bulk up for hibernation.

…

Brian Gunn, president of the Wilderness Tourism Association, said the collapse of salmon stocks is threatening the survival of ecotourism businesses.

“The bear-viewing businesses, the whale-watching operations, they built up a lot of equity showing people these wild animals. Now the fish aren’t there and they are seeing their equity drain away. …If the salmon go, so does the wildlife, and so does the business.”

Mr. Gunn blamed the fish-farming business, saying a heavy concentration of net pens in the Broughton Archipelago has created sea-lice epidemics which kill young salmon.

Long-held suspicions that fish farms act as disease reservoirs for wild populations are well founded, according to findings published this week in Science. University of Alberta mathematical biologist Marty Krkošek and colleagues show that outbreaks of salmon lice Lepeophtheirus salmonis among wild pink salmon Oncorhynchus gorbuscha populations — the direct result of infestations within the open-net aquaculture pens the juveniles must swim past on their migration to the sea — can bring virtual extinction in just four generations. The pressure wild stocks are placed under by the disease risk from fish farms is much greater than that caused by over-exploitative harvesting: the very factor that prompted aquaculture in the first place. It’s surely time for a re-think on fish farming. Source: Krkošek M, Ford JS, Morton A, Lele S, Myers RA & Lewis MA (2007) Declining wild salmon populations in relation to parasites from farm salmon. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1148744

Ray Hilborn, a fisheries biologist from the University of Washington who was not involved in the study but is familiar with its findings, called the data persuasive and said they raised “serious concerns about proposed aquaculture for other species, such as cod, halibut and sablefish.”

“These high-density fish farms are natural breeding grounds for pathogens,” not necessarily limited to sea lice, he said in an interview. Dr. Hilborn noted, however, that the study involved pink salmon, not species like sockeye or chinook, which are usually larger and presumably less vulnerable to sea lice. Pink salmon are the most abundant salmon species in the northern Pacific.